May 31, 2008

Our first choice was Dead Men Walking and it put me into the hospital. Just kidding. About the movie, I did go to the hospital. About an hour or so into the movie I got all flushed and passed out. I was out about a minute or so. When I woke up I was sweating like a pig and it took several seconds to recognize Greg. Sperhauk was talking to 911 and an ambulance was on the way. By the time the ambulance got there I was feeling better and when they took my blood pressure it was a bit low. By the time the ambulance left to go to the hospital, several minutes after they got to Sperhauk's, it was back to a more normal level. I got some saline solution which as we know is an important fluid for people and highly useful to stop the Monolith Monsters. I wasn't thinking it was a heart attack and I was right. It was dehydration, perhaps caused by my high blood pressure medication. I thought I drink enough fluids. I think I must have gotten to the hospital about 9 pm and got discharged just after 11 pm. The wonderful Simba picked me up and ran me home. Now I need to get into see my regular doctor and find out if I need to change my meds. All the EMT guys were great and the staff people at Abbot North Western were really nice. I felt I was in good hands. Now I think I need to get some sleep.

May 29, 2008

Remember those elephants that I bought on eBay. I was wondering what to do with them and this is what fell out of my head. Tarzan, Tantor the elephant, and N'Kima the monkey have found some nice big mushrooms near the Lost City of Opar. Tantor has stepped in some poop. Everybody is laughing. It's funny because it's Tantor's poop, and he's just left it there. Ever positive, Tarzan reminds him it's good for the mushrooms. Tantor thinks he should fill up again. The three friends load up on mushrooms and head for home.

May 28, 2008

Esther, one of the few ladies over at the TwinLUG, a LEGO users group, wants to have a Belville contest and have people build some stuff in Belville colors. The brick colors come in pinks, greens, whites, oranges, purples, with transparent glitter pink, or green, roofs. The idea was to attract the attention of girls and women at Brickworld, or at least have some different ideas on building with color. Appearantly girls don't like fighting robots as much as boys do. I can't imagine why. I have a couple of tubs of Belville stuff left over from some clearance sets. I hadn't figured out anything to do with those parts. I just needed some spark to light that idea's ass on fire. The idea here being some Minifig space explorers have landed on an uninhabited planet of really tall people. It's kind of like inspecting the downed ship in Alien. The astronauts walk past a huge dead alien sitting in a chair. Patio Of The Giants doesn't have any dead aliens, but it does have an astronaut, and he can barely reach up to the top of the table. Wow! Those missing aliens must have been huge!

May 24, 2008

We watched The Hideous Sun Demon. It's a low budget horror film from 1959. A science guy, with a drinking problem drops some radioactive isotopes and gets blasted with the radiation for several minutes. In the hospital he's rolled out onto the roof for some sun. That turns him into a lizard skinned guy. He's hideous! He scares an old lady and the doctor's cure him by putting him in a room with no sunshine. That would be a nice cure, sittin' inside for a while. The guy playing science guy is Robert Clarke, who acted in many other films and tv shows. He co-wrote and co-directed the film. It was shot on 12 weekends for about $50,000. He shot on weekends so he could save some money, getting a two day camera rental for the price of a single day. His hideous sun demon costume cost $500. It's not a bad costume and Clarke is not a bad director. He's not great either. He's got as many misses in his scenes as he has hits. At one point Sperhauk said it was like there were two directors and, according to the IMDb, there were two directors. Wow. Tom Boutross was the other one. He also edited the film. That's probably why there were so much of a noticible difference from one scene to another. We didn't have much sympathy for the science guy. He'd been drinking and dealing with dangerous stuff. What a dumb ass! They are so popular in the movies I see. Even when he's told to lay off the booze our guy winds up in a bar, where he takes a good long stare at the cleavage of the piano playing blond. Her song made me stare. A stare of incomprehension. I guess the director and I have two things in common. Neither of us knows anyone who's good enough of a singer to be in a crappy night club, and neither of us has the money to hire anyone good. Still the rough sex on the beach brought me back into the movie. Just kidding. There's nothing that graphic in the movie, demon included. The movie partially delivers with an odd seduction on the beach. Our singer normally dates George, a thug like guy in a suit who thought he had a date to take the singer home. Science guy punches him down and leaves with the girl. He wakes up in the morning, cuddled on the beach with Miss Cleavage of 1959, and runs off as the sun beats down on him. He leaves the girl sleeping on the beach. Sperhauk thought that might not have been the first time that happened to her. He arrives home and kills a rat in a scene cut from the tv version. More stuff happens as our lack-of-hero tries to deal, poorly at best, with his new non-specific dermatitis. He's back at the bar the next day and after the singer tosses a drink in his face George and his pals beat him up. The girl stops the beating and takes science guy to the hospital. At least that's what she tells George, who's the jealous type. She brings the monster back to her place. Talk about making the wrong choice in men. George shows up in the morning and puts 7 and 6 together and that equals naughty naughty. He pulls a gun and drags science guy out into the sun. Bad idea, but he didn't know he was taking a guy to his doom that would wind up causing his own doom. He's killed. It was self defense but that doesn't keep our science guy from making the wrong choice and running away. He runs over a cop, killing him. Now the cops are looking for our demon, with guns blazing. He runs about hiding and eventually is hunted down and destroyed. Back when I saw it as a kid this was the movie that I first noticed what I call the movie monster morality code. Even if it isn't your fault that you got that way, as soon as you kill, that's the end of you. There's a lot of tragedy in some of these 50's man into monster movies. Guess we should stay away from science if we drink.

Mike had asked a couple of times to see Mystery Men again. He hadn't seen it in a while and for some unfathomable reason he doesn't happen to have a copy. I don't know how these things happen. I too haven't seen it in a while. It was nice to see it again. It did poorly in the theater when it came out, but I loved it. People are often slow to latch onto something. Especially when it's something whacky. Kinka Usher, the director, was in the commercial business. This is his only movie. It's too bad. It's an amazing thing. It's a movie that's always in my top 100 favorite movies. Ben Stiller, William H. Macy and Hank Azaria are a trio of super heros. They aren't very good, they lack power and they don't work well as a team. Captain Amazing is the big super hero in Capitol City. Greg Kinnear plays him and Geoffrey Rush plays Casanova Frankenstein the insane super villian with long fingernails. They are the tip of the iceberg that is the cast. There are lots of jokes and funny stuff and great scenery and characters all tossed in together. Some little bit of the movie came from The Flaming Carrot comic. There were a couple of characters that made it to the movie and too weird The Flaming Carrot became Captain Amazing. It doesn't seem like a two hour movie, there's always something going on or something amazing to look at. Not for everyone.

May 20, 2008

Those are the three other Indiana Jones sets that I bought. I still have not bought the large sets, or the set with two trucks. I look at them in the LEGO Imagination Center and they don't seem to draw me. I don't think they are as good a deal, for interesting parts, and cool minifigs, as the smaller sets are. When the first batch of four sets came out I picked up the cheap one and as I said a couple of weeks ago, I really liked it. Indiana and his dad on a motorcycle is a nice set. And that fedora hat is really popular.

7621 Lost Tomb

Before long the urge to own a Marion Ravenwood minifig became too strong and I succumbed. She's pretty cute. Not Irina Spalko cute, but cute. Marion's got that great costume, nice hair, and that double sided head. Smiley and screamy. Plus, there's some cleavage. It's fairly common, that double sided head. The cleavage, not so much. I just realized that I am grateful that there are no minifig buttcracks. Really, it's those little things that make life good. There are several nice pieces in the box along with Indy and Marion. It's a nice compact set, just a one sided room with some moving parts. The statue falls over, knocks out a large wall panel, and Indy and Marion can escape. I don't know why they don't just walk out the room. There are no other walls. I never actually built the set I bought. I don't build a lot of the sets I buy, and not just duplicate sets, the only copy often doesn't ever get built. The Batman sets are a good example. I didn't build any of the ones that I got. Spider-Man? I only built the Green Goblin's Glider, and mostly because it was tiny. I don't play with the sets like they were toys. I just like to look at them, mostly, like they are statues, and a picture is often good enough. Takes up less space too. I do look through the instructions. I always find them interesting. I don't know why. There might be something to learn from looking at the pictures. I find I need to study more Techinics building techniques, and I can look at old intructions for ideas. Nowadays you can see most old instructions on line. That's so cool. I rarely keep a set intact, and I try to put all the instructions together. If the set's intact you can't use the pieces for anything. That seems a waste as parts are expensive. I have a few sets that I am keeping intact, not wanting to worry about missing a part when I want to rebuild them. Normally, I take all the pieces, sort them all out, pack them into containers, then have a nap. Once in a while I'll build something. This set has a lot of tan, and that's good for Harry Potter or Castle building, and other things too. There are a lot of small pearl gold pieces, seventeen in fact, that might come in handy for some build down the road. Statues or some building decorations. You never know. That's the tiny Ark of the Covenant. You can see it has a lot of bling on top. If you go back a couple of posts you can see Esther has taken the two Anubis statue's and the Ark from this set and put them in a bathroom for her mansion build. That's a fun idea, adapting something to your own concept. It works great for her. There is a big sheet of stickers. Huge sheet, size of a bath towel. Lots of Egyptian looking hieroglyphics to go on the large wall plates that crash out when the statue falls over. Stickers for the eyes of the statues. There is a sticker in the picture on the left of R2D2 and C3po that repeats a joke from The Raiders of the Lost Ark. The pair appear briefly carved into a pillar in the movie. You can see a still from the movie at Gizmodo. There's a flaming carrot. It's pretending to be a burning torch, but it's the carrot piece colored dark brown, with an orange flame on top. There used to be a weird comic called The Flaming Carrot and that caused the reference to pop into my head. It was about a guy with a carrot for a head. Instead of the green part sticking out of the end of the carrot head, he had some flame. It wasn't the greatest art but the stories were weird and funny. Back in the LEGO world I do like the orange flame. It's a different look from the neon-orange that is so common. It, and the dark brown carrot work pretty well as a torch. I'm thinking of using them for my burning torch carrying mob moc. Make it look more authentic. "Burn 'em!" I like the dark brown pieces that are appearing in sets right now. There are more dark brown parts in other Indiana Jones sets. One of the other things that I liked about the set were the red and green snakes. Nice to get some more color. I'd seen a red one used, stuck in a minifig head, as the spinal cord hanging down. Funny,

7625 River Chase

This set, based on the new movie, has it's own Marion Ravenwood minifig in a new costume. She's hardly aged in the 27 years between movies. There's an Indy figure, with all the good things he has, and a couple of Russian Guards, #2 & 3, in sand-green uniforms. It's a nice dark green alligator. Since I like the LEGO animals so much I wanted one of those too. There a good mix of light and dark bluish gray parts, and some nice dark brown arches. Good for trees. I used them in The Gildersleeve Uni-Tread Steam Wagon. The reddish brown slope is good for trees too. There's a rubber raft, with two brown paddles, that I am sure will turn up in lots of military or spy moc's. I'm not sure what to do with the one I have yet. It's got a nice little automatic pistol, lots of leaves, and a couple of those red snakes I liked from Lost Tomb. The vehicle has some dark green pieces and little by little I have gotten a nice, but small baggie filled with them. What to do? What to do? Sometimes color can trigger an idea. I like the 1 x 4 tile that has some dials and a leaver. That's the three Russian guards below. They have nice looking uniforms, and nice hats, but I just want to slap the smirk off the face of that first guy. The third guard comes with a brown backpack.

7626 Jungle Cutter

I wasn't sure that I wanted to buy a copy of Jungle Cutter. Most of the time I don't care for sets that have vehicles in them. I don't need more wheels that I never use. But, this set has treads. It's got two giant saw blades, which I don't think I need. But, it's got treads. One of the guys I work with has some Star Wars LEGO, he's mostly interested in Star Wars, which he shares with his 5 year old son. The son got the Star Wars LEGO Sand Crawler for his birthday. Dad's been helping him build it, making the son put the parts together, and it's been slow going. It's been more than a week. It seems there is a limited attention span at that age and many other toys that need their share of attention. Dad and I were talking about the set and it being hard to find all the parts in a huge box. It's old enough of a set that the parts are all in un-numbered bags. The instructions are the type that don't have the parts for each step pictured. That's gotten better in the last couple of years. But, what got my interest was the treads. That's what tipped me over the edge into buying a set. I like those treads. I wound up making The Gildersleeve Uni-tread Steam Wagon with them. There are a couple of other interesting parts in the set. A weird green spine thing, 5 more ants, a frog, a couple of dark bluish rock panels, and 7 of the bamboo leaf parts, plus many other good parts for stock. There are almost a thousand parts in the three sets, and 11 minifigs.

May 18, 2008

Two invading monster movies today. One from space and one from the ocean. Neither place I'm fixin' to go. I rarely have a desire to go places where you have to remember to bring extra oxygen. I can't even remember to bring a pen sometimes. The X From Outer Space is a 1967 Japanese monster movie and It Came From Beneath The Sea is a 1955 US production.

The X From Outer Space wasn't made by Toho, the studio that made Godzilla. Shochiku Kinema Kenkyû-jo made the film. That studio started in 1920 and they still make and distribute films today. Called Uchû daikaijû Girara in Japan, the movie was released here in the US by American-International. Turner Classic Movies runs the Japanese version letterboxed and that was where I saw it most currently. I'd seen the A-I version before. I'm pretty sure I got rid of that tape. I made a dvdr off of TCM. That's fine for me. It's not a great movie but it's fun enough, especially if you listen to the music. Much of it sounds like 50's sit com music. Lots of horns and strings and lively tunes. Just completely wonderfully whacky.

We meet a group of four astronauts from the Fuji Astro-Flying Center. They are soon headed for Mars. There have been reports of a strange spaceship in the area and the previous two missions have vanished. The crew stops at the moon for some dancing and cocktails. First the men share a bath and the women have seperate shower stalls. The doctor gets sick and there's a complaining doctor that gets the job. He doesn't want to go. Who can blame him. Remember those other missions did not come back. The current group does encounter the alien ship, which looks like a baked pie without the baking tin. The FAFC ship gets some filling gunk splashed all over the engine area. A sample, brought back to Earth, releases a tiny little thing we didn't even see. It grows up to be the giant monster that you see in the pictures. It wrecks things where ever it goes. Most of the effects are ok for the time and place. There's a bunch of buildings knocked down and some soldiers come and attack. They bomb it from planes, but nothing stops it. Some science guys figure out to cover the creature, named Guilala, with some Guilalanium. It looks like foam. The creature is reduced to a glowing crystal the size of a golf ball. It going to be shot into space. Let someone else figure out what to do with it. Isn't that just like people. Passin' their crap onto some other people. Garbage or monsters, someone is always throwing something over your fence.

It Came From Beneath The Sea is mostly famous for having Ray Harryhausen doing the creature animation. It's the movie that united him with Charles Schneer. They would go on and make all the really famous Ray Harryhausen films like The 7th Voyage of Sinbad or Clash of the Titans. This movie only has one monster. A giant octopus. It keeps attacking ships. It attacks the submarine commanded by our hero, who's played by Kenneth Tobey. He's a favorite actor of mine who's in a bunch of good films. You might remember him from The Thing From Another World. That's a good one for another day. Today Kenneth is fighting a giant octopus and winning the heart of a science gal played by Faith Domergue. She used to be Howard Hughes girlfriend. Here she's trying to figure out what the radioactive biomass found stuck in the submarine's propellers might be. It's a giant octopus. That's where Kenneth and Dr. Joyce meet. There's some science stuff and some dinner. Then the monster attacks in Oregon. Everyone runs up there and there's a comical sheriff that doesn't believe in giant monsters from the deep. He's convinced soon enough. Then it's off to San Francisco where Octy busts a big chunk out of the Golden Gate Bridge. Next? It's Market Street and The Embarcadero for some shopping. The Military shows up with flame throwers to drive it back into the sea where Kenneth waits with his full loaded and ready to fire submarine. Guess who's getting his water soaked ass kicked? Yep. Kenneth Tobey scores twice at the end. He gets the octopus and the girl. Make your own joke but the movie is fun and the monster is pretty good. Not the best quality of special effect but good enough. It gets the job done.

Today was the TwinLUG meeting over at the Rondo Library. We got the big meeting room for the second time in a row. More tables to spread out stuff. That's three of the letters for the TwinLUG moonbase project for BrickWorld. I am not going but someone will take my letter I along with their stuff. BrickWorld is just outside Chicago next month. Project Moonbase is a collabrative build that lets people follow a guideline and build their own modules. They bring them to BrickWorld, put them all together to form a little moon city. Buildings can be anything. Mine's the I and it's the office and showroom of the Blackstone Monument Company. They sell headstones and monuments to spacers. I imagine that there is a little graveyard outside of Moonbase. In my head I'm calling it Monument Valley. It has a nice view of the Earth. The N is by Max. It's some sort of technical thing that I'm not smart enough to figure out. In the future things will be more complicated. The U is by Kyle and it's a gantry for a robot. I suggested a pink robot, for contrast, but turns out Kyle has even less pink than I do. I have a little stuffed in a bin somewhere. He has none. Sad.

That's Mike's MOC for the group's Post Apocylpse BrewHaha that I am not making anything for. I'm not so good at making the mecha/robot stuff. The crane is from a LEGO set. Bet they didn't think there be so much carnage at that work site.

That's Aaron's out post or treehouse. It's got Knight's and lots of wood and a Hogwart's banner. I like the used of those wide brown pieces that form the roof. They are from one of the Star Wars sets. I got a bunch of those sets on clearance years ago. I was just looking at a bag full up in the attic this morning and thinking about putting them to some use. They could be parts of trees, ground, and plenty of other things. Just gotta think of 'em.

There is Gary's mobile home. It's 150% of Minifig scale. He designed it using the LEGO Digital Designer software at the online LEGO Factory. I haven't used LDD myself, not wanting another time consuming hobby. Then there are a couple of shots of the tower that Kyle built for the Post Apoc group build. Dylan built the little stream and what ever is going on in the last pic.

That's a little Indiana Jones inspired room that Esther built for the BrickWorld mansion build. People bring rooms and they build a big mansion. An idea that I would like to see in the TWINlug display case at the LEGO Imagination Center. Maybe once everyone's back from BrickWorld.

May 17, 2008

Two movies with Chris Mulkey tonight. He's an actor that's been in some pretty good things. In Dragon Wars, orD-Wars, he's FBI agent Frank Pinsky and he's trying to figure out what caused a huge burnt patch to appear. Terrorists? Gas Line? There's a reporter with a backstory and a magical charm on a chain. We see both in a flashback with Robert Forster, who's really a magical guy from 500 years ago. He just happens to live in LA right now and he's got a magical dragon scale in his antique shop. When the reporter, as a boy, encounters the scale he becomes the new choosen one. His duty is to find the magical girl out there and help her to her magical doom. There's a Korean Legend about some dragons that says the good and evil dragon fight it out for power over the universe. So, you can see it's important that the good dragon wins, even if he has to eat a girl to do it. Other wise evil will reign over the world. Some days it seems like the evil dragon has already won, and that girl is out shopping. The girl has to accend to heaven and power up the good dragon. If the evil dragon stops her, it's bad. There's a lot of dialog to get you there but the special effects are pretty good. The flashback is down right gorgeous at times. Most of the film making is A-ok. The story is pretty much typical. Hero has to find the ill fated girl and the bad guy wants to stop them. With dragons. There are a lot of film references in the movie visuals. That and the story sure make people over at the IMDb mad, they give the movie a 3.8, which I think is too low for a movie that delivers a great bunch of great special effect action scenes. There's an amazing battle in the streets of Los Angeles. The dragon is a Korean dragon which has no legs, but is hundreds of feet long. After they eat the girl they get legs, then they can fly with no wings. Those legends, don't you just love 'em. In the big battle in LA, there are military on the ground who fight evil soldiers on foot and monster back. The evil army had strange beasts that carry fighters or weapons. Both sides fire exploding bombs of some sort. There's a fight in the air. There are small flying critters that tangle with helicopters. The evil dragon crashes through parts of LA, and all sorts of buildings. It chases the girl right up a skyscrapper and pulls down her helicopter. There's a magical explosion that chars everything and gets rid of the evil army. Then the good dragon appears and battles the evil dragon for the girl. They crash about until the good dragon gets the girl, who then becomes an ethereal fairy princess. The good dragon grows a pair. Two pair in fact. He stomps the evil dragon with his new feets and the reporter gets to go home empty handed. There's a huge amount of collateral damage and the battle scenes are fun and exciting. Lots of explosions. It certainly makes up for the so-so dialog. Oh, and poor Chris Mulkey, he turned out to be a problem and his partner had to shoot him.

In Cloverfield Chris plays a military man who is fighting the monster that is rampaging through the streets of New Your City. He's only in the movie a short bit. Some 20 somethings are having a good bye party for a guy who is going to Japan. The whole movie is shot from the point of view of one video camera. The brother of the guy who is leaving picks it up and starts filming his girlfriend. He takes the camera to the good bye party to film testimonials from the brothers friends. He passes the job onto his pal Hud. Hud is a bit of a dumb ass. I'd tire of him quickly. He films everything in shakey cam, which is nearly as annoying as his dialog. After the monster shows up there is a lot of running around and some of the people get picked off. The guy who should have gone to Japan yesterday decides he needs to go rescue his friend. He races across town with a few people in tow. They run back into the path of the monster, which drops tiny monsters, the size of a big dog, like flakes of dandruff. If one bites you, you're infected and you burst. At least that happened to one gal. At least that's what I think happened. It was all behind a curtain. That was the trouble with the movie, most of the interesting stuff was happening off the screen or in a tiny version of poor quality. I want my monster movies to have monsters I can see. By contrast D-Wars had the dragons running around in daylight, in downtown LA, inches from the camera. I didn't like much of the Cloverfield monster when I could see it. It's huge though and there is a lot of damage to the town. But I want monster POV. With all the shakey cam and boring stuff it made the 84 minute movie seem long. The tape in the camera ran out at 73 minutes then there were 11 minutes of credits. We watched the deleted scenes, which were pretty poor, and the alternate endings, which were un-interesting. The short making-of featurette had some guys talking about creating the movie. They all told us things about the movie that were never evident from what we were seeing on the screen. Like the monster was a confused baby, scared and hungry. Hungry for human snacks! But we didn't know that when we were watching it. I didn't care for the characters very much. The shakey cam didn't bother me but it did many people. The movie gets a 7.7 on the IMDb and according to one comment it was 8.1 last January, 2008. I didn't find it to be that good and I'm pretty sure I won't see it again. I'd watch D-Wars again, it was fun to watch, and I will put the dvd on my to-get list.

May 11, 2008

I decided to watch a couple older science fiction movies on sunday mornings, and then blog about them. I'm up early anyway and it's a good excuse to watch some movies I haven't seen in a while. I'd like to watch something good each week but that isn't always going to happen. This week the movies have a common theme. End of the world. You know, I'm lookin' forward to that. The traffic should be better.

Five (1951) by writer director Arch Obler is supposed to be the first post nuclear holocaust film, at least according to Robert Osborne over at Turner Classic Movies, and I know he wouldn't lie to me. TCM ran Five the other night and I upgraded the copy that I had to DVDR. It's not out on DVD for some reason. Arch Obler was a radio drama guy who made some movies, most of which I have not seen. Five is set in California, shot mostly around the beach house in Malibu that Obler had designed by Frank LLoyd Wright. It's a nice spare little building which creates an interesting setting for the drama that plays out. The title refers to the number of people that are left. All were safely somewhere and they weren't effected by the radioactive dust. The only trace of the missing humans are occasional skeletons scattered about. First we meet Roseanne, the only woman, wondering around. She comes across Michael, who has a place by the sea. They hole up there, starting to farm. Along comes Charles, the only black man, and his old boss, who quickly dies of radiation poisoning. Charles pitches in, working along side Michael to keep everything going. Then Roseanne has a baby. A little while later Eric washes up on the shore. He had been in Europe and everyone is dead over there too. Michael likes to plant crops and stay out of the city. Eric doesn't feel the work is necessary when there are warehouses of food in the city. Eric is a big racist who doesn't even like sharing a room with Charles. Eric tricks Roseanne into leaving. He secretly kills Charles before he goes. In the city Roseanne finds Eric has no intention of returning to the beach house. Eric finds out he has radiation poisoning and runs off crying like a little baby. Abandoned, Roseanne heads back to the beach house, the baby dying along the way, and the farming continues. It's a bit sad, but what else could you expect from an end of the world story. I first heard of this movie because of my interest in Frank LLoyd Wright. Back in the 80's I kept an eye out for movies with his houses in them. I saw many of them on TCM. This might be the first to have a Wright building featured. It's a low budget film that has a few problems born out of poverty but they aren't anything to concern yourself with, the story is mostly pretty good. It's sounds like I've described the whole movie but the best of the story is not in that synopsis. It's in the details, a nice bunch of bits and pieces that are well worth seeing.

TCM ran a second end of the world feature after Five. In The World The Flesh & The Devil (1959) radioactive dust kills everyone. Harry Belafonte is trapped underground in a mine in Pennsylvania. When he finally gets out, after 5 days, everyone is gone. He heads to New York City where he holds up in a nice building. Thirty four minutes into the movie a woman shows up. A blond white woman played by Inger Stevens. Harry helps get some power to her building using a generator. A friendship develops which could lead to something more but Harry holds back. Mel Ferrer shows up on a boat and there is even more tension. Both sexual and racial. It leads to shooting guns. In the end the trio gets back together again and walks into the sunset while the movie flashes a "The Beginning" sign. I hadn't seen this movie before and I liked it pretty much. It's more what I would like to be doing if I was left alone at the end of the world. I'd stay in the city, go shopping for things, occasionally burn something down or blow up a car. You know the usual thing. You'd have to learn how to hot wire a car unless you stay close to a car lot. I like the look of the movie, there are a lot of nice shots of New York in 1959. The streets are empty and it looks pretty cool, especially in black and white. The music by Miklos Rozsa is pretty darn good too. He's done a lot of movie scores. I bet you've seen some film he did the music for, it's a pretty impressive list. Like Five, TWTF&TD has a lot to think about. I pretty much ignored that and watched the survivors flailing about. There are touches of reality in both visions and they have their heavy handed moments. I'm still glad I have seen them and might watch them again in the future.

May 10, 2008

Greg brought The Boris Karloff Collection, a 5 disc set from Universal Pictures. We picked The Climax from the bunch. It's Boris Karloff's first color movie. No one had seen it before and it's nice to see something new. Boris is the doctor of an opera company. He's a bit disturbed, the woman he loved disappeared 10 years ago, and he's still obsessed. In a odd optically ringed flashback we see Marcellina. She's an opera diva and the last person to perform The Magic Voice. Turns out Boris killed her when she didn't return his love. He blamed her voice. She didn't want to quit singing to be with him. He couldn't stand sharing. Nice guy. Since the movie is set in the opera world there are a lot of opera scenes. I'm not opera fan. I'm a big whimp, I don't care for singing that makes you feel you've been cut in a knife fight. There is the usual backstage goin's on. We liked Count Seebruck, the head of the opera. He recognizes talent in Angela, a young singer, and puts her on the stage. She sounds so like Marcellina, that the good doctor goes crazy. Oh, did I mention Boris still has the dead Marcellina, somehow preserved, in a coffin, in a locked room, in his mansion. What a nice mansion that is. The rich had more taste in old Europe. At least in their buildings. He put that secret room behind a nice curtain. Turhan Bey, who's last job was the Centauri Emperor on Babylon 5, playes the romantic interest to Angela. That Turhan Bey is so cute, with this smiley face, gleaming slicked back hair, and unbridled enthusiasm. He looks like a LEGO minifigure. Boris hynotizes Angela into not singing and there's some drama before the fiery climax when Boris and Macellina burn in his secret room. It's kind of slow the rest of the time and there's a lot of opera. Nice sets though. I wondered if the Opera House set was the same one used in The Phantom Of The Opera and the IMDb says it is. That set, still standing, is the oldest set in the world. I really liked the street scene that takes us from the doctor's door around the corner to the Opera back door. Very nice. Not a great movie but not one I'd probably care to watch again. Unless I want to see Turhan Bey again. He was more interesting to watch than Boris.

There wasn't anyone too interesting to watch in Monster Man. Sperhauk picked it up for 80 cents. It's a screener, every now and again it flashes the video companies logo and goes to black and white. It didn't matter. Two guys, one a whimp and one really annoying, are off to some tramps wedding. The whimpy guy is still in love with her, and the annoying guy is just annoying. He's the kind of guy that gets you in trouble shootin' off his mouth to people who would murder you. I hate those kind of guys. They seem to pop up in movies why too often for my taste. The guys get attacked by a monster truck, who turned out to the be best actor in the movie. There are some ok chase scenes but the rest of the movie has these two guys bugging everyone. There's a girl who shows up in a see through blouse and lots of bare leg. She sleeps with the whimpy guy. There are a series of murders going on and some dead bodies cross the boys path, sometimes rubbing against them. The annoying guy winds up at the end of the movie covered in blood. We didn't find it as funny as some people might. There were a couple of good laughs at the end, but that annoying guy is pretty damn annoying and he doesn't get knocked out nearly as often as he should. I don't think I'd need to get a copy of this to watch again. At least I didn't spend 80 cents.